


Don't Remember Me as Haunted

by Shoujo_Nosferatu



Category: Sonic the Hedgehog - All Media Types
Genre: Character Study, Gen, I wrote this years ago, i dont think shadow should've ever used a gun but i did my best to justify it, like everything i write it's a bit of angst and a bit of comfort and mostly just a character study
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-24
Updated: 2019-01-24
Packaged: 2019-10-15 10:40:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17527235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shoujo_Nosferatu/pseuds/Shoujo_Nosferatu
Summary: i made a zine about shadow the hedgehog called FAKER which you can get over here!! https://shojo-nosferatu.itch.io/fakerthat zine started as this fanfic, which i was never going to post, but a nice anon asked me to and it's been a minute so i thought 'why not.'that's it. thank's!!!!!!!!





	Don't Remember Me as Haunted

He heard the professor’s voice, crackling over the old relay, and something inside him at last unraveled. The dark cloud of the Black Comet dispersed and the ARK was silent. The people of earth breathed, in that still moment. The moment spent before they would have to go and pick up the pieces. The ARK hummed around him but the radio was silent. He was alone, as his ghosts appeared before him.

The Chaos energy dispersed, leaving him feeling sapped, exhausted. He crumpled on the cold floor of the Eclipse Canon control room, knees drawn up to his chest, and before he could realize it there were tears in his eyes.

He couldn’t place the last time he’d actually cried. Maybe in the escape pod, right after the raid. Alone, hurtling through the atmosphere, her last moments playing on repeat in his mind’s eye, unescapable. He’d cried here now, intermittently, as he wandered the colony’s darkened halls, leaving a dragging trail of footsteps in the dust. The artificial chaos—what remained of it—let him be, in mercy or simply luck he wasn’t sure. He passed through the lab where he was born, the experimentation pods, Gerald’s office. Maria’s room in the hospital ward. The observation deck where friends down on earth once stood and bid him farewell, thinking him dead.

There was a time when he thought he should have died there.

The memories came to him in waves, seemingly as easy as they had been lost. Just when he thought he had wrested himself back again they would well up from deep in his chest and into his throat, leaving him sobbing and keening in a manner frankly alien to him. He did not feel inside him the purpose of crying yet it flowed from him anyway. He felt somehow separated from it, as if his body was reacting on its own. It frightened him but he had no strength left to stop it.

He wasn’t sure how long he was up there. They radioed for him eventually. Amazing, he thought, breathing deeply and wiping his eyes, how the ARK’s communications held up after fifty years. Commander Tower issued a formal apology. The president would like to meet with him.

If life was strange before, it seemed stranger now.

He returned to earth with a compulsion to tell someone about it, a feeling beyond his understanding. He wandered, without thinking, into the city. Somehow he ended up on Rouge’s doorstep. Figuring, at the least, that she knew everything about what he was anyway. She’d read the file after all.

She’d seemed startled but welcomed him all the same. He didn’t speak—just sat in her apartment, silent, suddenly embarrassed at the attention. Fussing with his hands and staring at nothing.

“I remember. Everything.” They were the first words that left him.

“Everything?” she prompted, but he’d only nodded, and said nothing further. Silence stretched between them. She asked if he was okay. In a careful tone he admitted he wasn’t sure, which was more than you could usually get from the cagey and enigmatic Shadow the Hedgehog. In the end she offered him to stay the night, and though he took the invitation, by the time she awoke the next morning he was gone.

He met the president. Shook his hand. They offered him a job as a G.U.N. agent and he took it. It was all so surreal. He felt as if he had been pushed in one direction and now was simply floating, suspended along the runway. But at least he was moving forward. Finally.

He swore off rumination and nostalgia during that visit to the ARK but the coming months proved that it was not so easy as that, and once-lost memories now recovered were hard to get away from. At last he was tired of dwelling on the past, and now he couldn’t keep himself from it. He wouldn’t have known it but he was grieving in proper, for perhaps the first time since it had happened. No more scientists and warlords tapping in to use him, no more violence, no more vengeance. Just loss, in its simplicity. He was restless. With nothing else he poured himself into his work and for a period found it difficult to talk with anyone about anything else.

In this way, he was thankful for G.U.N., though he would measure that gratefulness very, very carefully. Standing amongst fellow soldiers still made him anxious in a way he couldn’t explain. An incident involving gunfire in narrow hallways prompted a superior to mention the on-base psychiatrist to him, apparently equipped to handle trauma. At the time he felt insulted, embarrassed. He told Rouge as much and she’d just sighed, and said nothing.

Maybe he should have gone. He wasn’t sure. The girl still came to him in dreams, though perhaps less frequently. He never spoke of it. Everyone on-base knew his story by this point. He would prefer them not to still think of him as haunted.

On the colony they had called him Shadow. He didn’t know the origin of the project’s name but he knew what the meaning came to be. Frequently they put him through testing, examining his limitations, his biology, his ability. He grew used to being prodded and looked at. But Gerald pushed for his independence. Despite objection he was given leave to roam free. And whenever she wandered from the hospital ward, there he was, trailing at her heels like a guard dog. Dark and silent.

Professor Gerald was complicated, Shadow determined. People were complicated, in ways perhaps Shadow had not been ready to face. In many ways, maybe he still wasn’t ready. The video of a grieving, angry, powerful man on the precipice of death loomed still in his mind—a man he had trusted, a man who had called him his son. A man—yet another man, the first in a long line—who had tampered with him to use for a murderous purpose. Shadow’s hurt and anger simmered. But he was still grateful for the freedom the doctor had fought for him to have. The first to treat him as a person, at least for a time.

He was a person now, not just a weapon, not just a tool. Being a person was complicated.

(Rouge would insist he was still a tool of a different sort. Ah, well.)

Rouge was there for him, at least. At first he couldn’t figure why she’d waste her time. In a fit of anger he’d later regretted he accused her of just gathering more intel on him. Just something new to add to his file.

She spat right back at him, unfazed. “You know full-well that I don’t do anything for Commander Tower when I’m not on the clock, so can it. I don’t give a damn about your file, Shadow, that’s someone else’s job now. But incredibly enough I do still care about you. I don’t know, a guy comes back from the dead with no memory from before makes you wanna look out for him I guess. Search me. But here’s the thing, Shadow: you can’t be a dick to everyone just because you think you’re the only one who knows what grief feels like. And if you think I’m gonna let you throw me around during one of your little tantrums then you’ve got another thing coming.”

That he left in a huff hadn’t surprised her in the least. But that he came back with an apology was a change she was welcome to.

Rouge was different from the others. She was older, and despite her coquettish façade, carried with her the responsibility of her government position. Easily the most reliable member of the freshly-assembled Team Dark, the most prepared, and the best pokerface—which was incredible considering the third member was a robot. She was a better agent than him without question and they were lucky to have her on their side. She never fit in with Sonic’s crew either. She wasn’t a vigilante; she had a paycheck, a company car, a stack of paperwork to tackle at the end of the day. There was a government-issued ID clipped to her hip with her name and agent tracking number on it.

Shadow had one now too. He had a couple of licenses as well, which was more than most of Sonic’s flock could flaunt. His employers insisted on it. Nice of him to be a quick learner during an alien invasion, but they would really prefer him to handle his firearms and motor vehicles legally, thank you.

Rouge admitted once that she hadn’t expected him to use firearms. He’d shrugged. They’re tools, he explained. Not unlike the shoes he wore to help him run faster. Why shouldn’t he use them?

“Well, Shadow,” she’d said, carefully—he noted—avoiding the manner of which Maria had passed. “You kind of _are_ a gun.”

He breezed over the lack of tact with a glance in her direction, offering mildly, “Then no need to waste my bullets on things that can be handled with simpler solutions.”

She had smiled, so he assumed that sufficed.

The thing with cars and motorcycles was more difficult to explain, considering he was able to move so quickly on his own. He wasn’t sure quite what it was. He just knew that he liked driving. Something of control, maybe. In time he’d learned that getting there fastest wasn’t necessary. Something Sonic wouldn’t understand, but, well. He still insisted they were different in more ways than they were similar.

Living in the present didn’t come as easy to him as it did to his counterpart (the comparisons strung between them were always inevitable.) Shadow supposed this was because Sonic was never expected to be anything he hadn’t set out to be himself. Whereas Project Shadow was riddled with complications: life perfected, never hungry nor fatigued nor in need of medical aid; a rogue lab experiment, a living weapon, an immortal cure; a man’s vengeance, a girl’s friend; wanted criminal-come-military pet, living and dead, Mobian and alien; murderer, protector, promise-keeper. He recalled it crystal clear now, hundreds of miles above the earth’s surface, when he’d posed Sonic the same question he would come to pose himself a hundred times.

“Just what are you, anyway?”

“What you see is what you get.”

Sonic was uncomplicated in a way Shadow would never admit he envied.

Sonic and his friends were still in their teenage years, most of them—full of energy and the need to expel it, endless that it seemed, timeless. Unusual teenagers, maybe—trained to fight, to modify planes, to be heroes—but teenagers still. Sonic will run and Tails will follow and Amy will chase but at the end of the day when they can they will gather together to share in cheap food and laughter and strange hazy thrills that come with friends in the forgotten hours of the morning.

Shadow couldn’t be that. He found it difficult enough to relate to other people, so different as he was even on just basic biological levels. (Still he would try, he had to remind himself, for her if for no one else, he would try.) He’d never say as much, but when he came to it, he didn’t think he really could keep up with Sonic. At least, not in the way that he felt mattered. He would outlive Sonic as he would everyone, if he was unlucky enough, but Sonic’s boundless energy stretched on into infinity and made Shadow feel old.

He didn’t keep track of his birthday and tried to keep anyone else from doing so, either—but he knew he had some fifty years or so on everyone. He spent a lot of it in stasis and a smidge of it in amnesia, he’d grant, but he felt it all the same. Being out in the field was the only thing that seemed to revive him.

But he wasn’t out on mission tonight, and he felt it, settled down at the end of a long day in his and Rouge’s little on-base apartment. He had a reputation for being difficult to keep hold of and usually didn’t stick around for anything other than enter the short stasis one would most charitably refer to as “sleep.” But the mission was hard and he yelled at a commanding officer again and then ran himself ragged out in the wastes and now he had come home and he was tired.

Rouge came home to find him as he was when he first entered, slumped on the couch. His eyes were closed, ears pricked, music playing. One hand slid for the stereo remote.

“Hey Shadow,” she said, fingertips on his shoulder. She was affectionate in a physical way that had bothered him, at first, so unaccustomed to it as he was. The thought that she could have been making genuine advances distressed him—he was sure some would have been delighted by it, but he wasn’t really equipped to handle that sort of thing. He wasn’t wired for it, he suspected. But it became readily apparent that that was just Rouge. Flirtatious, sociable, breezy with people in every way he wasn’t. It had taken some time but they both were adjusting.

He hummed a response, dialing his music down. Their tastes had never really matched up either. At one point, a gloved hand hiding an amused smile, Rouge had asked him if he actually liked that garbage or if he just listened to it to fit with his “edgy badboy” image.

His stoicism rattled, he’d shut off the car radio, heat in his ears as he insisted that he wasn’t sure what she meant but that there was nothing wrong with the music he listened to.

(She later apologized, and he was content with that.)

“Heard you got into a little spat today,” she eased into the kitchen, laying some files on the counter and starting a pot of coffee. A long night ahead for her, it seemed. He groaned, rubbing his palms over his face.

“I dealt in the manner I saw most befit the situation, and Sherman disagreed.” He said.

“Shadow the Hedgehog broke protocol to do things his way and got in trouble. Again.” She translated with a smile. He frowned, sinking deeper into the couch. “Gotta be a team player to make Tower happy, baby.”

“I _am_ a team player.” He snorted, staring at the floor. He could hear her laughing in the other room.

“Right.” She cooed sarcastically. “You’re a loose cannon but damn it if you don’t get results, huh?”

He smirked despite himself. “Exactly.”

She hummed, and went back to her coffee. The apartment was quiet for a moment.

“You know Tower and I grew up together? On the ARK?”

He wasn’t sure why he was bringing it up. It was unlike him to talk about himself, much less share details about life on the ARK. Maybe he was just tired. Tired and feeling sentimental.

“I had some idea of that,” she called from the kitchen. Shadow stared up at the ceiling. Of course she did. No information gets past Rouge the Bat. “He failed to mention that during the briefing on Project: Shadow, naturally.”

“Naturally.” He repeated. “He was close to Maria’s age, I think. She liked him though I never thought much of him. He was scared of me, I could tell. Hard to think of him as the same person now.”

“I dunno.” She replied. “You two kind of remind me of each other.”

He bristled a little at that, showing teeth to his smile. “Really?”

“Mm-hm.” She poked her head around the doorway. “You’re both unbearably grim and I can’t stand being around either of you.”

He laughed, tilting his head back. It was a personal accomplishment, Rouge once noted, that she could get the Prince of Darkness to laugh at a joke made at his own expense.

“An unfortunate set of circumstances for you, then.” He said, still smiling.

“I know, a tragedy. Don’t worry, I’m at least living with the fun one of the two of you.”

Shadow grinned, tapping the toes of his boots together. “I do believe that will be the first time anyone described me as 'the fun one.'”

“Count your blessings, I’m being generous. Hey, I’m going to do a bit of shopping tomorrow. Wanna come?”

“Do I want to follow you around carrying your things?” he replied, and pursed his lips. She batted her eyes at him. “Fine. Yes. Sounds lovely.”

“ _Thanks_ , handsome.” She grinned, blowing a kiss in his direction. He made a mocking gesture of flicking it out of the air with one gloved hand and she laughed. He smiled in return. To his credit, he thought, he had come a long way. This was almost a normal person’s interaction.

“Oh,” he checked the clock, sobering. It was late now, and the stars would be out. He stood, stretching, and went to the closet to fetch a scarf. “I’m going for a run.”

“At this hour?”

“Well,” he sighed, chin tucked against his chest as he wrapped the scarf around his neck. “It’s. Her birthday, so.”

When he saw her piteous look he frowned at it. “I’m doing fine.” He added, he thought, needlessly. “I’m not waiting for the dead to blow out candles or anything. I’m just going to go out and look at the stars for awhile. Maybe visit the memorial.”

She leaned against the doorframe, arms folded. Her expression changed, relaxing. “Alright, I trust you.”

Good. He finished tying his scarf.

“Do you want any company?”

He paused. It never occurred to him that anybody would have wanted to come with him. He was sure everyone was sick of hearing about it at this point. He himself was weary of it but, well. Some traditions you just can’t pass by. Some things you keep with you not because you’re chained to them but because they’re important.

He nodded toward the files on the counter. “Don’t you have work to do?”

She shrugged, gesturing with her freshly brewed pot of coffee. “I’ve got some time. Here, I’ll walk with you a bit. Then I’ll come back and leave you to your thing.”

He considered it, and found himself cautiously comforted by the company. He nodded. “If that’s what you wish.”

“It _is,_ actually.” She smiled, putting the pot back on as she gathered her coat. He waited for her by the door.

“Alright, let’s go.” She said, pulling a hat down over her ears. He opened the door, the chill air sweeping into the room.

“Let’s.”

Out into the night he went, Rouge by his side, and above them both the halls of the ARK hummed, empty.


End file.
